And Vijay Says…

I have been on the vendor side of the table almost all my professional life . I have done development , support , relationship management , sales and so on . Throughout my career – irrespective of my employer – a recurring issue I have seen is that customers feel they don’t get adequate value from their vendor contacts. And I hear from my account colleagues “I don’t even know what the issue is – they never told me before escalation “.

So here are a dozen thoughts about that – as usual, just my personal opinions only. Maybe some of this will help you – and I am looking forward to learn from your experiences.

1. First things first – and pardon me for saying this bluntly – you get what you pay for . So choose your software , consulting and support model wisely . Vendors typically think highly of customers – but remember they run a profit making business . The analogy I use is the one of cheap airline and hotel tickets – the provider doesn’t make any money on the ticket itself . But they will charge you a lot for changing travel dates or a change in destination. So know what you are buying into . Haggle all you want when you buy – but buy with your eyes open .

2. Have a master agreement in place up front with every vendor . Negotiate all you want with the general framework of all future contracts for the life of that document . This will prevent you the grief of wasting time on boiler plate stuff on every transaction .

3. Treat your vendor representative as a partner – understand their goals and share your goals . Remember that he or she is not there to just sell to you . The vendor pays them to be your advocate too within the vendor company . Use that to your advantage . Every CXO I worked with when I had a sales goal in past knew my targets . In many cases I knew what their goals were too . You wouldn’t believe how easy life becomes when trust is based on transparency .

In most companies , the vendor sales guys are only allowed to talk to procurement team or best case with IT team. And that conversation typically happens when vendor tries to sell the customer something – including contract renewal . If that is all you do with the account executive – you will not maximize the benefits the vendor can give you .

Pull these people into steering committees – maybe without a vote if you so choose . This will let them know of problems before they become emergencies, and they can arrange right people to support you . If they know at the last minute – they will still try, but might not be able to help you get the help you need quickly .

4. Help each other – there are ways the vendor can help you, like early access to roadmaps , helping you get relationships at other customers , getting you extra quick support etc . In return , the most important thing you can help with is to expose vendor to other parts of your organization . You don’t need to casually give away your business at all – That would be dumb . But let the vendor get a big picture of how your business is run . Whether he sells or not should be dependent on his value proposition – not just on relationship alone.

5. Be a reasonable reference . If the product sucks , by all means call the vendor on it . But when it does something well – try to help the vendor by offering to be a reference on your terms . It goes a long way in cementing the relationship . Set the terms you are comfortable with in the master agreement . Every time a Customer asks me for a reference , I ask them back “glad to do that for you, but will you be kind enough to do the same for another customer ?”. In most cases – my request meets stiff resistance . But I generally turn this around with time – it is mostly because customers think a lot of stuff they do in their project are unique . But as a vendor guy I see multiple such projects to know that 80% of what is considered unique is not so unique .

6. Be active in the community and drag your vendor representative with you there . Remember – not all account executives are community driven , but they will get the “what is working and what is not” quickly if they see you there . Encourage them to get active along with their product and engineering colleagues . Good things have happened – and can happen in future too .

7. Encourage vendors to play together – where applicable , ad always for your benefit only . End of the day – you need solutions, not bits and pieces . Encourage all your vendors to work together – supervise them a few times if needed to get them started . The idea is not to eliminate competition – just use competition wisely where needed . For example – let your consulting company and product companies offer you bundled deals . What they need to do is convince you that you get a better deal than if you bought separately . This is not easy for a lot of procurement teams because their KPIs do not align . It can work in your favor if done thoughtfully – get the help of a buyers agent if needed . Give it a shot .

8. Innovate at your pace – but remember there is always budget to make/save money . A lot of customers have told me that they have no money left to buy what I am selling . I don’t have a problem with that at all. If I cannot express the value of what I selling in quantitative terms with reasonable assumptions we both agree – I haven’t earned your business . So give me the information on how I can help you , let’s build a business case together . If it doesn’t satisfy you – don’t buy at all. If I look like I am just wasting your time – tell me on my face .

9. Be creative if and when it makes sense . Many customers do not understand there are many ways to write contracts . Vendors can arrange financing – which can save your cash flow . Vendors might agree to fair risk-reward contracts – including holdbacks , charge backs and so on . A lot of customers who think they have no money do not consider these options . And of course not all vendor sales people bring these up either . You don’t lose anything by asking – so ask any way . May be it will work for you 🙂

10. Don’t hide behind procurement or your consulting teams . Often I hear from customer IT and business teams something like “I don’t even know who to ask this question at the vendor . So I have asked out consultants and our procurement team”. Nothing wrong with this per se – but remember that consultants and procurement people won’t know the problem like you do . So their ability to help might be limited and they might even confuse the vendor . Cut the middleman and get introduced to the vendor . Don’t do this by breaking governance policies – help set up a governance policy that lets people close to problems to talk directly with vendors . Remember – policies are set up to increase efficiency , not to decrease it .

11. Business is personal – it is always done between two (teams of) people at the end , not by two companies whose names appear on the contract . The point being – if you are not comfortable with your vendor representative , it is fair to ask the vendor for another person to work with . This is completely a valid thing – and as long as you are fair and professional , there is no reason to hesitate . You need to be comfortable with the people you are dealing with .

12. Use peer networks effectively . If you are not convinced with the solution the sales guy is offering you for office of the CMO – ask your CMO to call the vendors CMO and ask directly for her experience with this solution . More often than not – this will help both sides . Your account team should be happy to set up such peer meetings for you all the way from developers to CEOs . Use it to your advantage – within fair limits .

That is it – I am done . Probably longer than I expected it when I started typing it . Let me know what you think

There is plenty of coverage in social media now on the infamous concept of stack ranking . And honestly it took me by surprise . I thought I will post couple of thoughts here . Poorly implemented stack ranking is just horrible and should be avoided at all costs. But my position is that some level of stack ranking is unavoidable when an organization reaches a certain size. And there are ways to do it better than the miserable ways I read about in blogs etc .

A profit making company has only a certain amount of resources to spend on compensation . I have worked for managers who had socialist tendencies of distributing available money more or less equally . This did no apparent good for team performance . The excellent performers felt cheated outright and many left the team . The poor performers interpreted it in a way that made them feel they are doing just fine .
In short , it was lose lose for my manager .

Stack ranking surely fosters competition amongst peers – the question is whether it is healthy or unhealthy .

If every manager has to stack rank – invariably only bad things can happen. No team has a perfect bell distribution and good people will lose out . And no A player will want to work with another A player ever again.

However if the pool of people is larger – this way of ranking might actually work ok . I have seen it work well first hand . Example – if the VP of west coast sales has a fantastic year and all his sales people exceeded quota , he won’t have any under performer that cycle . But VP of Central region might have some under performers . If the country manager tried to normalize the performance at country level – stack ranking would make more sense than each VP needing to do this with smaller teams .

Let’s not kid ourself – every company at a certain number of employees will have some poor performers that will weigh down everyone else . They need to be replaced periodically with new employees to keep the company healthy .

The result of stack ranking need not always be getting fired either . In many cases, a transfer to another manager or another role could change a poor performer to deliver better .

Annual performance exercises are useless – they are after the fact and there is nothing much the employee can do to change the decision . But if the performance management is a continuous process – it can easily work better . And that means line managers partnering actively with HR and not just checking boxes.

In my opinion, the good vs bad performer is not where the issue comes up. It is the average performers that pose the challenge . I had a manager who once told me about it this way – outrageously compensate the best ones , give enough to the average ones to make them try harder next time and give exit options to repeated poor performance people. I don’t think that strategy is bad – it is all about executing to the spirit and not the letter of the strategy .

As always – these are just my personal thoughts , not to be confused with my present or past employer policies .

Recently, I had a very interesting conversation with some old friends, some of whom were my past managers and some that worked for me. The question came up as to “if there is only one thing that you can suggest to someone to be more successful as a leader, what would be it?”.

There were many answers – and none were bad. My own take was “Don’t be a jerk”.

I am a pretty easy going guy – I don’t take offense at the drop of the hat. And while I don’t forget easily, I readily forgive. And knowing how many times I screw up, I ask for forgiveness readily too ( does not mean I get forgiven very easily all the time though 🙂 ). I have fond memories of every manager and leader I ever worked for – except one. And that one dude was a jerk, and I will happily starve to death than work for him one more time. You cannot believe the speed at which I walked out of that job.

Respect for the individual is at the core of leadership – and yet, traditional management lingo completely ignores it. People are not resources or capital that are to be optimized by a manager like inventory. Nothing agitates me more than people referring to others as resources. So if you are new to leadership, or are trying to find how to improve – start with “respect for the individual”.

Organizations mostly assume that process trumps people when scale is required. This is true – as long as people play along. And people won’t play along unless they see value in what they do as part of the process. The moment you fail to explain the value of their work is when you start donning the jerk costume. For you to explain, first you need to take time to understand and think through it. Trust me – it is time well spent.

Jerks thrive on secrecy. Don’t get me wrong – a lot that happens in the company needs to be held secret for good reasons. But over doing the whole “it’s a big secret” thing is terrible and it erodes trust rapidly. If you feel you are hoarding information and handing it out in chunks to your employees all the time – stop and reflect on it and fix it if needed. I have seen many managers suffer because someone above them realized first that the manager in question is just not giving enough information to their teams. If you recognize it before others, you win. If you don’t – you lose (now or in future, and it is fairly irreversible after the fact).

A version of secrecy is access control to superiors. The best managers I know of have always facilitated access for me to their managers. And I try my best to do that to people I manage. I once had a colleague email me that went “can you send me the status of your project so that I can send it to the big boss?”. I responded with the status of the project with a cc to the big boss asking “hey, is this the big boss you mentioned?”. I never had another incidence like that after that.

Jerks tend to blindside their employees. I firmly believe that a manager should reach out to the lowest rungs of the hierarchy directly on occasion and get a first hand pulse check. However, this should be done as an exception and not as a rule. Once you undermine the authority of your chain of command downwards – they won’t trust you anymore and you would have successfully earned the “jerk” title. Remember – authority and responsibility should go hand in hand. If you hold someone responsible, make sure she has the authority to do what you want to be accomplished. Otherwise you are setting her up to fail.

One final thought before my next call starts – these things alone don’t make you a jerk or prevent your from being successful necessarily . You can get away with most of these bad behaviors as long as your team knows that they won’t be punished for calling you on your bad ideas discretely in private. It is not ideal, but many managers that I think of as jerks succeed because they listen when someone tells them privately afterwards, and then they do something about it.

Be a good human being – and respect people around you.
And that is an order, damn it , you human resource 🙂